


Honey, you're familiar

by superkv917



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Angst, Based on a Tumblr Post, F/F, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Idiots in Love, Mostly Dialog, Pre-Relationship, i had an idea but then this dumbasses took it to another place
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:40:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28055514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superkv917/pseuds/superkv917
Summary: “Maybe we should skip this one” Kara puts it on top of the ‘answered’ pile.“Rules are rules, you can’t change the card, Kara” Lena grabs the card and hands it to the woman in front of her.Kara hesitates for a moment “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I really, totally, understand so please don’t feel pressured”.Lena is awaiting expectant when Kara asks in a soft voice, almost apologetically, “What is your biggest regret?”“You’re seriously asking this question to me, Lena fucking Luthor, how long do you have?”.ORA 'bonding experience' leads Kara and Lena to realize they had already met in the past.
Relationships: Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor
Comments: 32
Kudos: 572





	Honey, you're familiar

**Author's Note:**

> Based on  
> this idea.

It is one of the nights where the stars aligned and they can actually relax together. Kara finishes her superhero duties and flies to L-Corp to pick up Lena. On the way back to Kara’s apartment they pick up some pizzas. When they arrive, they settle in the living room and put the food on the coffee table. Kara grabs some plates from the kitchen while Lena picks a bottle of wine from the cabinet they hide from Alex so other people can enjoy the alcohol that’s kept in the apartment. 

They walk back to the living room and sit across one another, Lena on the couch and Kara on the floor, to have better access to the pizzas on the coffee table. She is in the middle of picking up a movie they haven’t watched on Netflix when she hears her friend asking her something. 

“What is this?” She picks up a red metal box with the label ‘ice breakers’. Kara looks away from the television and drops the remote on the table. 

“Oh, it’s a silly game Kelly brought a few nights ago when they came for dinner with Alex” she answers. “There are cards with different questions. It’s supposed to help people open up when they are in a group of people they don’t know very well. Do you wanna try?” Kara asks excitedly.

“Um…I’m not sure” Lena hesitates. 

“Come on! It’ll be fun!” The blonde insists. 

“Okay, give me the cards, how do we play?” 

“I told you, we pick several cards we want to play with. We divide them into two piles, one for you and one for me. Then we pick a card and read the question out loud for the other one to answer. Then we repeat the process until there are no cards left” She explains. 

“Ten cards sound good?” Lena asks and Kara agrees, nodding. The brunette shuffles the cards and deals them. 

“You start” Kara proposes. 

“Okay, let’s see…” She picks a card from her pile and reads “What is a food you can’t live without?” 

“Oh, that’s an easy one, potstickers… and, pizza… and chocolate cookies, and fries, and ice-cream and…”

“You’re supposed to pick one, darling” she interrupts, finding hilarious her friend’s inability to commit to a favorite food. “Anyway, you go know.” 

“This is a fun one. You have to sing karaoke, what song do you pick?”

“I don’t” she laughs and then adds jokingly “I can’t carry a tune even if my life depended on it, and you know it.” 

“You didn’t answer the question, that’s cheating!” She says, “also, you’re missing the whole point of karaoke which is something people do to have fun when they are drunker than not”. 

“How do you feel about clowns?”

“Wow, deflecting much?” She points out. “To answer your question, clowns scare me so much and I think they should be banned from traumatizing children for fun”. She picks up a card and reads it out loud “Where’s your favorite place to nap? And feel free to add your answer to the previous question”. 

“My desk. There’s something about 15 minutes power naps on my desk when I have to go through 20-hour workdays that just hits different. And no, you’d never hear me sing”. She takes a drink. “I’m doing you a favor, you’d be horrified if I ever tried to sing in your presence, and I value my best friend a little more than that”. 

“So you _do_ sing. I doubt you’re as bad as you say, though. I just think you’re not used to being average, being a genius prodigy and all”. 

“No, I’d be satisfied if I were average, I am truly terrible.”

“Wow, and she’s still not answering. I can’t believe Lena Luthor cheats on games like every other person on Earth”. She teases. 

“I’ve been accused of worse crimes,” she says off-handedly, and then looks Kara directly in the eyes before saying “I’ll take my sentence”. 

The air leaves Kara’s lungs and it’s a good thing Kryptonians don’t need to breathe as much as humans do because otherwise, she’d be dead. _When did Lena’s voice become so low pitched?_

“Shut up and read your question.”

“Yes, boss.” _Is that actual flirting or wishful thinking?_ “What’s a problem you have that might be entirely unique to you?”

“Um…I just can’t truly hug people. Humans are really fragile and when I get excited I tend to lose control over my strength” She answers with some sadness in her voice. Lena gets the sudden urge to get up and give Kara the tightest hug she can manage. It’s not tight enough, but Kara lets her anyways, placing her head on her friend’s shoulders and taking a deep breath. 

Lena sits next to Kara on the floor, rubbing circles with her hand on her back. The blonde, trying to lighten up the mood reads her question “what languages do you know how to speak?” 

“Fluently? English, French, Italian, Mandarin, and Russian. But I can maintain some conversations in Spanish and Portuguese if necessary, and understand basic Latin. What’s the best thing you’ve got going on in your life at the moment?” She stands up and moves back to the couch, sitting with her legs crossed. 

Kara pretends to think about the question. _You_ , sits on the tip of her tongue but she can’t get it out. “I guess my family and friends” She can’t help adding “now that you’re back in our lives.” _Why am I trembling? When did I become so weak?_ She forces herself to look away, playing with the zipper of her hoodie. 

They settle into an uncharacteristic silence. After a moment, Kara catches Lena looking at her, expectantly. 

“Why are you looking at me like that?” She asked

“It’s your turn to read”. 

“Oh, right. What is something you do when you feel overwhelmed?” She takes the crust from the two slices of pizza Lena had eaten and shoves them into her mouth. 

“I make lists.” 

They both burst out laughing. 

“Seriously?” 

“It calms me down. So I can prioritize which problem, personal or professional, needs my attention first. It’s called economization of time”. 

“Alex would call it something else, she’d say it’s called being a control freak.”

“Whatever. What do you do then, Miss Danvers? Enlighten me” 

“Unfortunately, Miss Luthor, that’s not how the game works. Pick a card.”

“Now who’s deflecting?” She joked. “Okay…What’s the silliest thing you are pretty good at?” 

“Oh, this! Look!” She opens her mouth and folds her tongue in three. 

“I’m impressed,” she raises an eyebrow. 

Kara picks up a card. “Maybe we should skip this one” Kara puts it on top of the ‘answered’ pile. 

“Rules are rules, you can’t change the card, Kara” Lena grabs the card and hands it to the woman in front of her. 

Kara hesitates for a moment “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to. I really, totally, understand so please don’t feel pressured”. She doesn’t want to ruin this easy routine they’d built the past few months, it’s not willing to, but she also has a soft spot for how Lena looks at her so she eventually gives in. 

Lena is awaiting expectant when Kara asks in a soft voice, almost apologetically, “What is your biggest regret?” She inhales deeply. Partially because it takes her by surprise, but also because the silence in the room needed to be filled by something other than the echo of those words. After a second, she blurts out a sarcastic “You’re seriously asking this question to me, Lena fucking Luthor, how long do you have?”. She says with an amused tone. Kara visibly relaxes.

“I didn’t want to. I’ll just pick another one” She stretches her arm towards the cards but stops when she feels the other girl’s hand on her wrist. 

“Don’t. I can answer, let me just…” she straightens her posture and pours what’s left from the bottle of rosé on her glass. “…pick something from my very long list of disappointments”. She makes a motion of unrolling a piece of paper.

Kara knows her friend has had her share of hardship in her life, that she’s been let down countless times, and she doesn’t want to put her through all of them again in favor of a stupid game Kelly left by accident on Kara’s apartment. In an attempt of easing up the atmosphere, Kara says “Of course you have a list. Is it categorized?”. She gets her answer when Lena looks away while blushing. And Kara thinks it’s such a Lena thing to do, to actually have an organized list of things that did not do well according to her standards. 

“What can I say? I’ve always been pragmatic” she shrugs. “Are you interested in any particular category? I suggest ‘the top 10 times I wasn’t Luthor enough’ or its equally heartbreaking counterpart ‘the top 5 I almost was’”. 

The blonde pretends to think about it for a moment. “No, it won’t do”. She teases. “Do you have something along the lines of ‘the one time I had a teenage crush and I embarrassed myself so much that it shaped me into who I am today?”. Silly, she wants to hear a silly story. 

Lena is hit by a deeply repressed memory, 

She thinks about _the_ woman from her senior year of college. 

“Not really” Lena smirks. “Although there is something I didn’t do when I was 18 I’ve always regretted that is kind of embarrassing”. Lena says with a playful tone. 

“Lena Luthor is human?” Kara jokes. “Do tell...” she says doing her best Lena impersonation. 

“Well, I turned 21 one month before finishing college at MIT. And Lex surprised me with tickets to an extremely exclusive bioengineering conference in National City, which I was dying to attend. He said he’d gotten them from one of his closest friends, who had someone working there. Since he had worked so hard to get them and whatnot, in exchange, he wanted me to do something every 21-year-old should do: crash a frat party to ensure I’d get the whole ‘college experience’…”

She pauses briefly and stretches her legs which were tingling from staying crossed all afternoon. Then continues: “The day of the conference I woke up buzzing with excitement. I had arrived the night prior and Lex had agreed to pick me up the following day. However, twenty minutes before the conference, he called saying something had come up, apologized, and said he’d pick me up once the convention was finished to make up for it…” 

Kara kept looking at her, expectant. 

“I rushed into the first exposition and picked a seat on the fourth row. Once in my place, I gathered my notebook and a pencil just in case I wanted to take some notes. I was prepared to hear about groundbreaking technology, and then…” She starts laughing. 

“What happened?” Kara started laughing along with her. 

“It was noon, the conference ended and I hadn’t heard a word”. She covers her face, self-conscious. 

“Why?” 

“Five minutes before it started, I felt someone slipping next to my seat. A moment later, she tapped on my shoulder and asked if I had a spare piece of paper. I tore off a sheet from my notebook intending to give it to her, but when I turned to look at her, I panicked and gave her the whole notebook.”

“Oh…why?”

“I had just recently figured out I was attracted to women, and it was all too new. I didn’t know how to handle it. She breathtaking, so beautiful it made me malfunction…” _Same_. 

“I didn’t know you were…uh…gay?” Kara says timidly. 

“Yeah, yeah, but wait, it gets better. Later that night, Lex picked me up at the hotel saying he wanted to make up for canceling in the morning. He swore he’s found the best party to crash on the NCU campus and forced me to go with him. We arrived and went straight to the kitchen for whatever alcohol they kept. He poured some vodka into a plastic cup and went to the garden to grab a beer for him ‘because one of us has to be the responsible one, Lena’…”

“I waited for him in the kitchen but he was taking too long, so I decided to go look for him. I opened the door and stepped into the girl from that morning. And considering I forgot how to breathe the first time, one would say I could only be more prepared the second time, right?” Kara nods “Well, I wasn’t. She had her long hair loose and was wearing low cut shorts with the shortest crop top I’ve ever seen. I was so weak, it’s embarrassing."

“She recognized me, too. She thanked me for the notebook and asked me if I wanted it back. Se offered to give me her notes too because she’d noticed I hadn’t taken any. She went to look for it, but then Lex got into a drunken fight, and I had to drag him out. I never got my notebook back.”

“So… that’s your regret, not getting the notebook back?” Kara asks, standing up. Lena watches her walk towards the bathroom. 

“Not really,” she says to an empty living room. “More like I’ve always wondered what could have happened. If I had waited for her, maybe we could have known each other, become friends. But I don’t dwell on the past, it’s not like it would have worked out when Lex became full-blown psycho, anyway.” 

“If you could meet that woman now, would you like to?” Kara asks while Lena is picking up the trash from the table. 

“I don’t know, she probably wouldn’t remember me, and what would I say anyway? ‘Hi, I’m the girl who gave you a notebook ten years ago, I haven’t stopped thinking about you but I swear I’m not a psychopath like my brother, I’m just a useless lesbian’”. She hears Kara come back from the bathroom laughing. Lena picks up another bottle of wine, and when she’s back on the sofa she opens it and pours a glass for herself. 

“It would be a good start,” the blonde says. 

“How well do you know your neighbors?” Lena resumes the game. 

Kara’s heart is pounding in her chest. _Breathe._ “It was me.” 

“What are you talking about?”. 

“The girl from NCU” Lena’s eyes are filled with tears. Of _fucking_ course the first woman she ever felt attracted to and the woman she had spent years of her life pinning after were the same. 

Kara felt Lena’s heart rate quicken. 

“I visited Alex after the auditorium. I walked into her dorm and told her I had sat next to a woman with the prettiest eyes, and that she’d lent me her notebook but had forgotten to take it back. I told her about our interaction word for words, and she freaked out, saying I was talking about this woman as if I was attracted to her. She said I was being weird, so I let it go.” 

Thinking back, Alex may have been projecting some of her internalized homophobia onto her sister. And Kara didn’t know better, so she followed her suggestions. 

“Then, when I crashed into you at the party and went to grab your notebook, I ran into Alex’s roommate, Lisa. She teased me about it, saying she could see my crush from miles away and encouraged me to ‘go for it’ and write my number at the back, so the ‘ _ball will be in her field’_ ”. 

“When I came back you were gone, and though maybe Alex was right, that I was acting a little weird, so I let it go and didn’t think much about it”. She stands up towards her room. “But I kept it, let me just…” She walks towards her closet, takes out a flowered box, and opens it. She takes out the notebook and goes back to the living room. There, she hands it to Lena. 

The brunette takes it with shaking hands, not believing what was happening. She opens it and sees seven numbers and the name Kara written on the last page, along with a doodle of a phone. 

* * *

When Lena leaves, that night, she deliberately forgets the notebook on Kara’s nightstand. Kara finds it and sends her a text. 

KARA: *attached picture* You forgot it again?

KARA: I get the message, you don’t want it back. 

LENA: You clearly didn’t, darling 

LENA: Look at the back. 

She opens the book on the last page and sees on the lowest part of the page the drawing of a table, seven numbers Kara knew by heart and _dinner?_ Written in perfect handwriting.

**Author's Note:**

> This is my second time writting so feedback is appreciated.  
> Come say hi on tumblr.


End file.
